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December 15, 2013

five months old.

This girl is growing up too fast!!

I'm not ok with having a five-month-old. Although it helps that she's still such a weakling and wants me to hold her three seconds after I lay her down on her belly. :) I love a snuggly baby. Tummy-time is overrated, anyway. We like flat heads. She can skip rolling and crawling if she wants. Sitting and walking sound like more fun. We'll just go straight into those lessons, thank-you-very-much-miss-physical-therapist.

Ugh, I wish that could all be true.

"Neck-xercizing" is so much work. I have no idea how I'll react when we have another baby and they just miraculously start holding their head up one day. And enjoy being on their belly. And teach themselves all kinds of new skills without a training regimen.

To start, we aren't supposed to let Ruthe be on her back at all when she's not asleep or in the car seat. She needs to always be on her side, with the top foot touching the ground (even if I have to hold it there), and both hands in front of her reaching for toys or my face or anything. She also needs to spend a significant amount of time (that's really only 5-10 minutes a day) on her belly with her head up, and in an upright sitting position. The bouncer, swing, and hoppy don't count. That's too reclined, so too much like laying flat on her back. She we put her in the high-chair... with five kitchen towels rolled up and stuck every-which-way to hold her steady. It's quite the production.

And how do you think Ruthe feels about all of this?? She hates it. HATES it. I don't blame her. I love laying flat on my back too. And I would really love to be able to just close my eyes and fall asleep anytime someone tried to make me do something I didn't want to do the way she does. It's actually quite impressive...

But I can't just sit here and complain that all of these things are just awful and produce no results. She is getting stronger and smarter every day. Today was the first time we out her in the high-chair, and I'm pretty sure she loved it. For the first minute, anyway. She just sat there and stared at me and held her head up like a champ. And then she realized we were just going to keep staring at her and smiling like a couple of crazy-people, and she got really mad really fast. She took a little nap laying on her side today, too. Which I totally count as exercising. Hopefully she'll have made more than just a little progress at her next physical therapy appointment.

In other news, we started trying to feed her rice cereal. She hates that, too. But she won't keep a bottle in her mouth once she realizes that there's milk involved. I'm running out of options for oral-feeding. Maybe I'll try something extra delicious... like chocolate frosting!! Nobody would cry with that in their mouth!!

Ruthe is also quite the chatterbox, once she gets going. She will just lay there and talk like nobody's business sometimes. It's so cute.

I just love this girl. She has definitely caused plenty of stress and worry and sleepless nights, but the smiles and sweet snuggles make it all worth it.